On Notes from Underground by Fyodor Dostoevsky
The first time I read Notes, I was confused throughout Part I. I couldn’t figure out the tone and what the Underground Man was trying to get at. He seemed to be writing a critique and kept referring to the “gentlemen”. I slogged through Part I but could only take away from it that the Underground Man is meant to be a useless and spiteful man. I considered him a bum and a weak man. He exerts power that his bureaucratic position admits him, he contradicts himself, he is petty and spiteful, seems to believe in nothing positive. The only thing that struck me was that he refuted 2+2=4 and that he reserves the right to spit on it and say 2+2=5. All in all, on the first pass, I remained entertained.
Upon the reread, I decided to skim through Nikolai Chernyshevsky’s What Is to Be Done? I fell this places much of the Underground Man’s thought in Part I in a clearer context. Now, not only was it interesting to read its scathing critique of Utopianism, it is incredibly hilarious having read Chernyshevsky’s novel.
The first section is an introduction to the reprehensible nature of the UM. He confesses that he is a sick and wicked man. The entirety of Part I, in fact, reads much more clearly as UM’s confession on this rereading. He refuses to see a doctor despite his illness. Its mentioned that the UM is menat to be a representative of the time period, still living amongst the Russians, but a dying breed. He takes pleasure at the misery of others, such as his colleagues. He also admits his complete uselessness, comparing himself to a fly to indicate that nobody sees him. He can pass through a crowded street and feel invisible, not that there is a damn thing he can do about it. He also claims that the more intelligent and the more aware of “the beautiful and the lofty” that he became, the more he plunged deeper into his predicament. It’s clear that this is some sort of confession since he says “that is why I took up the pen”.
UM uses a mouse as a metaphor for himself. He claims intelligence, that he achieved higher consciousness as the gentleme suggested, but this is too much for the human decision-making process. He starts to describe the conscious inertia which the inertia that results from the high conscious mind attempting to compute a course of action. He describes being helpless as the “judges and dictators” stand by to assess. If actions truly came down to rationality, the immediate implication of course is that we can arrive at the “correct” decision, one that maximises pleasure and minimises pain. This does not have to be a perfect decision, but it is required that there is a best possible answer, a local maximum for the utility function if you will. But how exactly does the human mind compute such decisions for every action possible? The lack of ability to do anything due to being overwhelmed by such a higher consciousness is what leads to this inertia. Personally, I wonder at what granularity and domain we must make these assessments. Are pleasure and pain meant to be optimised at the individual level or at a communal level? How does one reconcile conflicts at these different resolutions of analyses. How could one achieve such higher consciousness, if it indeed could exist? It is not hard to produce an example in which such a highly conscious individual maximises their pleasure at the disproportionately maximal pain of others. Conversely, if we consider individuals who are of the sacrificial type, who maximise their pain at the disproportionate gain in pleasure for others. There are discrepancies here that are surely too obvious.
“so-called virtues and obligations and other ravings and prejudices will finally be resolved, go ahead and accept it, there’s nothing to be done, because two time two is mathematics. Try objecting to that.”
Even if one agrees with much of what Chernyshevsky has to say, you’d have to at least acknowledge the narcissism and arrogance to propose that humans and human life is a problem to be solved as in Mathematics, and that you are the one to have found such a solution.
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If such was the case, that is, we can in fact solve human problems as in Mathematics, via axioms, theorems and consistency via logic and proofs, why would this world be a desirable option? To live and behave by known proven laws alone, would take the flavour out of life wouldn’t it? Isn’t the imaginative, unpredictability and uncertainty of life what makes it tolerable? We are not a set of piano keys after all, as the UM says. A world in which you cannot deviate, cannot object, cannot rebel is not a world worth living in. In such a world, there are no possibilities. We are reduced to machines, and only predictable work will be there to be done and seen through. We serve a so-called function and nothing more. We’d surely have no need for the arts and creativity in this world. After all, such ideas are born out of the irregular and unpredictability of life. Welcome then, to this world, come in and exist, as a cow.
Why do reasonable wants and interests supersede independent wants and interests? What law is that? Point me to the man who has only made rational decisions. The basic assumption of the Utopianists is that man only behaves poorly and irrationally because he actually doesn’t understand his own interests properly, that is someone enlightened him to such a fact, his base nature somehow goes out the window and he now becomes a card carrying member of Utopia. But what has actually changed about man that facilitates this new reality? And maybe more important, who are these “gentlemen” who will come and enlighten us poor fools on our incorrect interests? I’m sure they must be noble men. We, the “civilised and developed” continue to partake in bloodshed all the while fully conscious of the consequences.
“because what is there to do if everything is calculated according to some little table?”
Such ideas drive the world towards determinism. The assumption that individuals don’t have variance in their agency. For the UM, freedom and individual agency to make decisions takes precedence even if the individual acts against some measure of his own “profit”. I will defend the idea that individuals must have the freedom to act against their own profit. Yes, read that again. An individual, as he has the freedom to uplift himself in an allowing society, must have the freedom to destroy himself.
“Man is predominantly a creating animal, compelled to strive consciously towards a goal and occupy himself with the art of engineering.”
“Man will build roads that goes somewhere, the point is not where it goes, but that it goes.”
Often, the pursuit is what gives life flavour. Existing for the sake of existing in the Crystal Palace is simply not the desirable endstate of mankind. That is the description of a Zoo. And as long as there are those who propose such Utopianist ideas, there must be those who will reject them, and this the Utopianists cannot reconcile.
I’d have a drink with the Underground Man.
